


The Theory of Everything

by addictedtostorytelling



Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-06
Updated: 2016-05-06
Packaged: 2018-06-06 18:45:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6765532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/addictedtostorytelling/pseuds/addictedtostorytelling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gil Grissom has always been a ghost in high school, but now his universe is changing. CSI High School AU. Based on a prompt from songlyricsincludingthewordfjord on tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Theory of Everything

**_The Theory of Everything_ **

Gil Grissom is a ghost.

Not in the physical sense. He’s alive. Corporeal. Natural. Visible. Able to see himself in the mirror, seventeen and lanky, with sandy brown curls that his mother keeps neatly cut and blue eyes she tells him he inherited from his father—a man whom, every year, he has a harder and harder time at all remembering.

No, he’s a ghost in the social sense—nowhere to be found in the places where his peers typically congregate, spending his time in the school library and teacher carrels instead, usually distracted by the latest book he’s reading or whatever is staring up at him through the lens of his microscope. He isn’t a member of any clubs, he doesn’t hang out with any cliques, and his only extracurricular activity is T.A.ing for the entire collective science department at Clark Senior Intermountain High School: biology, chemistry, and physics.

At home, he is equally reclusive: It’s just him and his mother Betty and his dog Hank. He never invites anyone over, and he never goes to visit anyone himself.

For a kid with no friends, you would think he might be lonely, but he doesn’t mind being alone. Actually, he prefers it. He grew up in a mostly silent house with no siblings, so he finds other kids distracting, with all their chatter and baffling, nonsensical social cues. Overwhelming, even. If he ever has to spend time in the company of other teenagers, he tries to keep a low profile. He follows the same modus operandi and even gives himself rules to abide: engage with no one, be in and out, and don’t speak a single unnecessary word if possible.

That’s how it’s always been with him, and things only start to change in his life when the chemistry teacher asks him to tutor the head cheerleader, Catherine Something-or-Other, who is apparently whip smart but refuses to follow directions.

Grissom has never even talked to a cheerleader before he and Catherine start working together.

He quickly discovers that cheerleaders are—or, wait, he shouldn’t generalize; so maybe just that this cheerleader is—bossy and stubborn but also surprisingly intelligent and quick to call him on what she refers to as his “incredibly myopic bullshit.”

Catherine has an impressive ego, and she seems almost to enjoy arguing. She also reminds Grissom in some ways of Betty, who runs the local art gallery and is the only Deaf woman in a town filled with hearing people. Betty is a force of nature, and so is Catherine—not that Grissom would ever mention the resemblance to either one of them.

In spite of himself, Grissom finds that he admires his new student. She’s smart and tenacious, and she gets things done. Plus, she’s more organized than he is, so sometimes she helps him to keep track of his administrative duties as a T.A.

Her boyfriend, on the other hand, is another story. Why Catherine is with that troglodyte, Grissom may never know. The guy is the quarterback on the football team, but aside from his athletic prowess, he doesn’t seem to possess any redeeming qualities. He’s a known bully, doesn’t treat Catherine well, and is taking remedial math for the third time entirely because he’s lazy and refuses to do homework. And the pièce de résistance? He actually tried to shove Grissom into a locker once, which is something that typically only happens on TV or in the movies.

Grissom doesn’t dare ask Catherine about her choices, of course. She seems to have a strategy behind her every action, so maybe she has a strategic reason for being with Jerkface, too.

Three weeks after Grissom starts tutoring Catherine, he gets his second student: Warrick Brown, the star sophomore wide receiver for the high school football team, who is flunking biology, not because he’s stupid—far from it—but because he keeps skipping class and playing hooky on test days. He’s a party boy, or so says the biology teacher. Apparently, Grissom had better help him shape up or else he’s facing academic probation.

Word is that Warrick left his freshman lab partner, Holly Gribbs, to dissect their frog by herself, and she got so nervous about covering for him that she ended up slicing her finger halfway through with a scalpel. Now she’s being homeschooled.

The teacher says that if Warrick wants to pass, he has to work with Grissom to earn back the credit. No partial amputations this time.

Grissom doesn’t know what he expects from this arrangement, but it certainly surprises him when Warrick shows up to his tutoring session with sophomore backup quarterback Nick Stokes in tow. Nick says he wants to earn a 4.0 G.P.A., and he’s heard that Grissom can help him do it. His deal is physics. He needs to bag an A.

Warrick and Nick always stay for each other’s tutoring sessions and are both bright when they’re not bickering. As far as athletes go, they’re fairly upright, and while Grissom is certain that they would never spend time with him if their grades didn’t depend on it, he senses that, in a strange way, they respect him—and especially after they find out that he has a gift for memorizing baseball stats.

“You’re pretty all right, Griss,” Nick says one day, giving him a hard, approving slap on the shoulder—which is apparently how athletes demonstrate affection.

“Yeah, for a brain,” Warrick says, smiling and slapping him on the other side.

Then there’s Greg Sanders, the seventh grade prodigy who skipped into the ninth grade. Everyone says he’s going to be the next Grissom, and, in fact, the science teachers want Grissom to start grooming Greg to be the replacement T.A. for next year.

Honestly, Grissom can’t stand kid. For one thing, he never stops talking about inane and sometimes lewd topics. For another, he changes his haircut every week to something increasingly ridiculous and almost dizzyingly colorful. He dresses in black and studs, with punk pins decorating his clothes and book bag like bizarre honors from a counterculture military.

He is, in his own way, a genius, Grissom supposes. And he’s affable. But he is also incapable of remaining on task, and training him is taking Grissom twice as much time as it should.

Weirdly, Greg doesn’t seem to mind spending so many extra hours in Grissom’s company. He asks Grissom about other members of the student body—“Who’s that girl? Does she have a boyfriend?”—and never seems to care when Grissom inevitably has no answers for him. He acts as if they’re actually having a two-sided conversation that interests him, no matter what Grissom does or, more likely, doesn’t say.

So that’s Grissom’s—he doesn’t really know what—his crew—his team: the head cheerleader, two jocks, and a talkative wunderkind. For whatever reason, they all seem to like him, and he’s—well, he finds it difficult to remain indifferent towards them, at the very least.

Still, Grissom wouldn’t call them “friends,” because fatherless, C.O.D.A., loner science nerds like him don’t have friends. They don’t need them. And true to form, Grissom still doesn’t even want for social companionship. He has his dog and his studies to entertain him. In fact, he can’t think of a single person he would actually want to spend time with outside of school, if not for the tutoring and job training.

Until he meets the new girl.

She starts at the school in January, after everyone returns to school following the semester break.

The teacher of the ninth grade physics class is out for the day. He got sick with the flu after first period, so he asked Grissom to cover his class because it was too late for him to call in a substitute. It’s something that Grissom has done before, and, by now, he has established a routine. He gets in, starts lecturing, fields questions, and then gets out before the other kids can hassle him too much.

But this day, he walks into the classroom, takes his usual place in front of the board, and is waiting for everyone to shuffle in, when suddenly he spots her at the back of the pack: a tall girl, with heartbreak brown eyes, a pretty rose petal mouth, and a ratty jean jacket that’s about three sizes too big for her.

She has a ponytail, and she’s beautiful.

Because she’s new and because she’s the last one into the room, she gets stuck sitting at the front of the class. Grissom can tell she doesn’t want to be there—can tell she would rather be anywhere else in the world, in fact. From the way she slouches so low in her desk, she seems to want to sink through the floor tiles and absorb into the earth so that no one can see her.

But he can’t help but see her.

He’s never cared about girls before—he has other things to occupy his mind—but he instantly cares about her, and especially when he starts asking review questions during his lecture, and at first no one answers him, but then she does, and she’s right on with everything she says.

She knows more than any ninth grader should. She's absolutely brilliant.

Grissom’s responses to her initial answers must encourage her, because suddenly she’s actively raising her hand, asking him to elaborate on concepts and go into more detail. She starts posing him questions of her own, and, even though there are nineteen other kids in the class, it’s like it’s just her and Grissom, talking science, telling each other the secrets of the universe.

Catherine, Warrick, Nick, and Greg are all good science students, but the new girl understands science in the same way that Grissom does. To her, these aren’t just principles. They’re poetry and a means by which to understand a world that otherwise makes no sense—that could be arbitrary and chaotic but instead is wonderful. She’s talking string theory to him, chains of universes, and suddenly his whole universe is her.

After the bell rings, she stays behind. She and Grissom both have an open period now. They walk out onto the quad together. They end up talking on a bench.

Her name is Sara, and she and Grissom talk and talk for the next full hour. She just moved in, she tells him. She says that at her old school, she was taking a senior A.P. Physics class, but they haven’t allowed her to take a placement test here yet, so she’s stuck in general with the other freshmen. Grissom promises he’ll have a word with the teacher for her—that he’ll get her into the class he’s taking, where she obviously belongs.

He can’t stop staring at her when she talks.

There’s something about her—she’s smiling at him, but her eyes seem sad. She acts shy, keeps fidgeting with her hair, trying to tuck her bangs behind her ear, looking down at her feet, shifting her weight.

Grissom has never been curious about people, not on a personal level, but he’s curious about her. He wants to know everything about her.

So every day after that, he seeks her out, and it becomes a routine: they spend their open period and lunchtime together, and, when she finally gets moved into the senior A.P. Physics class with him, she becomes his lab partner.

(He has never had a lab partner before.)

Because she’s his lab partner, they sometimes spend time together after school. At first, they only hang out on the school grounds, studying together and finishing up extra credit assignments, but then one day Grissom blurts out that Sara should come home with him to see the new telescope he ordered from the _Nature_ catalogue.

“There’s a, uh, meteor shower tonight,” he says, suddenly feeling like his heart is about to beat clean through his sternum.

She stares at him for a moment, and, briefly, he worries that she might think stargazing is stupid—or that he’s stupid for asking her to come with him to his house.

The truth is that he has never had a friend come home with him before. He’s not sure he invited her in the right way or if the invitation was welcome. He probably did everything wrong.

But just as he’s about to downplay his invitation, she smiles at him, and this time her eyes don’t look sad at all. “I’d love to,” she says. “Just, uh, let me ask if I can, okay?” And when she scampers off to use the phone in the science office—by now, the teachers have accepted her presence in their carrels as much as they have his—he feels like his heart has actually flown away from him, and it’s about to enter the stratosphere.

Sara gets permission to come home with Grissom, and, as they walk back to his house together, she unexpectedly reaches out and takes his hand. When he looks to her, surprised at the gesture, she seems terrified at what she’s just done, but when he smiles, reassuring her that what she’s done is more than all right by him, she smiles back, and suddenly he realizes that this whole time he’s been in love with her and never known it until now.

Bringing the girl he loves home is one thing, but having her meet his mother is another. Somehow in all the hours Grissom has spent talking with Sara, it’s never come up that his mother is deaf. Whereas most of the other kids at school know that Grissom’s father is dead and that his mother can’t hear and that his dog is his only companion, Sara doesn’t, and the closer they get to his front door, the more he worries that it might be a problem when Sara finds out what his family is like.

“Do you know sign language?” he asks her—which isn’t what he meant to say at all. When she looks confused at him, he clarifies, “Because my mother is deaf, and she signs.”

“I don’t,” Sara says, considering. “But would you sign to her for me until I can learn?”

Grissom didn’t know that it was possible to fall even more in love with someone that you already loved, but he does right then.

“Yeah,” he says. Then, again, suddenly, “My father died when I was nine.”

Sara doesn’t miss a beat. “My father died when I was nine, too.”

Grissom should probably say something reflective, acknowledging what Sara’s just told him, but he knows from experience that sometimes there’s nothing to say to someone whose father has died. Instead, he asks another question: “Do you like dogs?”

Sara smiles. “I love dogs.” And heat flares over Grissom’s skin, just knowing that Sara loves something that exists in proximity to him.

Hank jumps up all over Sara when Grissom leads her in the door. Betty is subdued, though obviously surprised that Grissom has come home with a friend—and not just a friend but a friend who is a girl—or maybe even a girlfriend.

(Grissom isn’t exactly sure what it means that he and Sara held hands all the way from the school to his house yet, but he’s kind of hoping that they’re going steady now.)

But Sara quickly wins Betty over when she compliments some of the art in the house and even knows the painter by name. She has a hard time, at first, looking at Betty and not Grissom when she and Betty are talking and Grissom is interpreting for them, but once Grissom tells her that she should keep eye contact with his mother, she tries her best to do it, and she even apologizes the few times when she looks at him by mistake.

She takes Hank’s exuberance completely in stride, and she seems a bit delighted when he whines for her to pet him. She’s incredibly polite and thanks Betty profusely when Betty makes her and Grissom lemonade. She also washes both her and Grissom’s glasses out in the sink after they’ve emptied them and dries them on the dish rack, like she already knows the house rules without even having been told.

When Betty finally leaves Sara and Grissom alone in the backyard to set up the telescope, taking Hank back into the house with her, Sara tells Grissom that his mom is really nice, and the sadness is back in her eyes, but her voice sounds so sincere.

“You and your mom seem really close,” she says.

Grissom’s curiosity comes through. “Are you and your mom close?” he asks, and, for a second, a strange, unreadable expression passes over Sara’s face.

She opens her mouth. Says, “Well—,” and draws a breath.

But then the finderscope falls off of the optical tube because Grissom didn’t screw it on tightly enough, and they both get distracted reattaching it to its perch.

It takes a long time for the sun to set and even longer for the meteor shower to start. Grissom is honestly surprised that Sara’s mother would allow her to stay over at his house until two in the morning, the fact that it is Friday night notwithstanding, but he doesn’t question the decision because he’s honestly so happy just to have Sara with him.

To keep her company.

The night is chilly. It’s the end of February, and the ground hasn’t yet thawed. Grissom and Sara lie on a blanket in the yard, and it keeps them warm for a while, but, eventually, Sara starts shivering. Her ratty, oversized jean jacket isn’t very insulating.

Grissom offers to go get her one of his mom’s coats, but she says she wouldn’t want him to miss the shower, so he stays with her outside. When he hears her teeth start chattering, he debates with himself for about half a second before pulling her into an embrace and wrapping his own coat around her.

They stay that way while the meteors fall, and, though they can’t see many of the meteors, even using Grissom’s telescope—there’s too much light pollution inside city limits—everything feels kind of perfect. There are the occasional bright contrails that dash quickly across their lens, and there’s the cold earth, and their breaths frozen against the air, and there’s them. They draw closer and closer together, until, eventually, Sara leans over and gives Grissom a kiss, soft as a whisper against his lips.

His first.

“Was that okay?” she asks him quietly, and he loves her so much that he can’t speak, so he kisses her back, and that’s his answer.

From then on, Sara comes over to Grissom’s house often. They do homework together in his living room, and Betty usually insists that Sara stays over for dinner. Grissom shows Sara his bug collection and has her with him when he opens his university acceptance letters—all twenty of them. Hank develops a special bark just for Sara, and he insists that she play fetch with him at least once during every visit.

Sara quickly becomes part of Grissom’s life—and also somehow a part of Grissom.

She teaches him so much about what it means to be patient and compassionate, to give people the benefit of the doubt, and also, simply, to take notice. All of those things are gifts she gives to him, and the last one most of all.

Sara is the first person who notices Grissom, who learns that sometimes he needs to be rescued from his silences and sometimes he needs her to join him in them, who can tell the difference between the obsessions that distract him and the obsessions that motivate him, who can sense when he gets down on himself—when he feels he’s not done his best in his T.A. duties or underperformed on a test or disappointed his mother—and knows just how to respond, whether it’s to amuse him with trivia or surprise him with a kiss or even to say that he should give himself a break. She always remembers the stories he shares with her and treats every one as if it were important. Oftentimes, she’ll quote his own words back to him. Oftentimes, even without words, she’ll prove to him that she’s really listening, that she’s hearing what he’s not saying. What he doesn’t have to say. When she’s around, he doesn’t feel like a ghost.

“How do you do that?” he asks her one day.

He’s just butted heads with the chemistry teacher during prep time—had a fight about Catherine Flynn still doing things her own way—and Sara’s found him in the hall by his locker. He hasn’t even said anything about getting into it with the teacher, but Sara has his hand in hers. She’s massaging the tension out from between his joints in soft, careful circles.

“Do what?” Sara says.

“Know things,” Grissom says. “I mean, about me. You always know what’s going on, even before I say what it is.”

“Not always,” Sara says. She stands on tiptoe and kisses his cheek. “You’re hard to read sometimes. But I try to pay attention.” She shrugs. “That’s just what you do when you care about someone.”

Grissom knows what she says is true because he’s never paid more attention to anyone than he has to her. Even when they’re not physically together, he thinks about her all the time and wonders how she’s doing—about if her classes are going well and what she does when she goes home at night and isn’t at his house anymore. He wants more than anything for her to be happy, and sometimes he thinks she is, but other times she still seems sad, like there’s this perpetual hurt she carries with her from someplace, and he doesn’t know why or what it is.

The really strange thing is that in paying so much attention to Sara, Grissom seems to get into the habit of paying attention in general—of noticing things not just about her but about other people.

About his team.

He notices that Catherine Flynn has started fighting with Jerkface. From what he’s seen, they’ve always had a hot and cold relationship—arguing with each other in the lunchroom only to later make out in the locker bay—but it used to be more hot than cold. Now most days of the week, Catherine shows up to her tutoring sessions looking decidedly annoyed.

“Are you all right?” Grissom asks her one day when she huffs in ten minutes late, seeming liable to kill someone and hide the body in a river.

“I’m great,” Catherine says, rolling her eyes. “Eddie just had to take the Camaro through the carwash on our way back to campus after lunch. He didn’t care that I had an appointment. But why should that surprise me? He never cares about my—” She stops herself. “Whatever. I’m over it.”

But she doesn’t seem over it.

After her initial outburst about the Camaro, Catherine starts to complain to Grissom about Eddie every day, at least once per tutoring session.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” she says, by way of apology. “It’s just that I feel, I dunno, like—”

“If you respect someone, you should respect their time,” Grissom says, quoting one of his mother’s favorite maxims—or at least an approximation of it.

“Exactly,” Catherine says. She sighs and glances across the quad, watching other students come and go, some of them paired off as couples, all of them seeming decidedly more content than she. “We’re not gonna last,” she says. “I know we’re not. But I want to make the most out of this—the head cheerleader, the senior quarterback, being prom royalty.”

“Prom’s already happened?” Grissom says, surprised that he completely managed to miss it.

“No,” says Catherine. “But it will. Then graduation—and on to bigger and better things.”

Grissom supposes it should have already occurred to him that even someone like Catherine could have her disappointments in life, but somehow it surprises him to know that she’s not living the teenage dream like everyone expects. He’s even more surprised that she would confide her discontentment in him, of all people. He guesses it’s because she views him as harmless.

But hers is not the only secret he comes to keep.

In the coming weeks, Grissom also learns, after overhearing a phone call that was meant to be private, that Warrick Brown isn’t skipping class to horse around. He’s running bets all over town, trying to make money so that his grandmother can keep her house. He’s got a racket going, but he’s barely covering his bases. He’s gotten in trouble with some of the guys who hang out at the local bar.

When Grissom confronts Warrick about what he’s overheard, Warrick hangs his head in his hands.

“I’m in deep,” he says. “I just—I have a few more things I have to follow through on before I can really focus—before I can get back on track with school.”

Grissom doesn’t know how to help him except to keep that secret, too.

The more attention Grissom starts to pay to people, the more he starts to realize that everyone has some secret they’re keeping—some better than others.

Nick Stokes, the golden boy of the entire school, has his father, the town judge, breathing down his neck, riding him to succeed, perhaps too hard. He has six older brothers who were all lettered varsity athletes, board scholars, and Eagle Scouts before him, and he doesn’t want to be the runt of the bunch, the one who lets his old man down last of all, tarnishing the family legacy.

Greg Sanders isn’t just a goofball. He’s a little fish in a big pond, desperate for someone to like him and help him learn to swim. He spends so much time with Grissom because no one else will give him a chance. He’s two years younger than his fellow ninth graders, and they won’t let him forget it. No one will. He eats lunch by himself on the peripheries of the quad and spends his passing time hiding out in the teacher carrels so that the J.V. football squad doesn’t bully him in the locker bay. He might be the only kid in school with less of a social life than Grissom has—only he actually wants to be social and longs for a real friend.

Even Sara’s got something she’s carrying with her, something she knows about herself that she keeps closely guarded from everyone, Grissom included. Grissom doesn’t know what Sara’s secret is, but he has an idea that it has something to do with why she always comes home to his house and never wants to go home to hers.

Whatever it is must be the thing that always causes her to look just a little bit sad even when she’s happy and to start asking Grissom, as the school year’s gone on and his graduation has crept up closer and closer, to promise that he won’t forget her when he goes off to college—to please just remember her, please.

“Can I still visit your mom when you’re gone?” she asks him one day while they’re lying on the living room couch together, taking a break from their studying, her body draped over his, her head rested at his shoulder. “My signing isn’t good, but I could at least say hello.”

Grissom smirks. “Won’t your mother think it’s strange if you keep coming over to my house, even when I’m not here?”

Sara doesn’t say anything, but Grissom feels her sharp intake of breath. She strokes over the buttons on his shirt with her thumb and remains quiet for a long time. When she finally speaks, her voice sounds faraway, even though she’s right beside him. She doesn’t look him in the eyes.

She says, “I haven’t seen my mother since I was nine.”

Then she explains her reason to him, and suddenly he knows her secret, too.

Her father and mother were both drunks, she says. And her father had a temper. Grissom worries for her retroactively—for things that might have happened to her years ago before he knew her. He asks if her father ever hurt her, but she says he didn’t. He hurt her mother. But she saw it. Her mother was crazy, she says. Paranoid. Delusional. She talks about fighting and screaming and trips to the hospital. Then she gets quiet and again faraway.

She says, “My mother killed my father when I was nine. Stabbed him seven times in the chest with a kitchen knife. I’ve been living with foster families ever since. Next year, I’ll probably be somewhere else again. At another school, with more strangers. I think I’ve always been a stranger except—,” a pause, and she swallows something down, “—except when I’m with you.” She sighs then, deep, from the bottom of her lungs.

So that’s it.

By now, Grissom has been in love with Sara for several months, and he’s learned a lot about love in that time, including that sometimes loving someone means having your heart break for them in ways you never expected.

He can’t stand the idea of Sara feeling alone. He can’t stand to think that all this time she’s been worrying that he’d leave her behind and never look back, just like everyone else in her life has done before him. He would sooner die than abandon her.

He blurts out, “I think you should come to school with me.”

It’s an impulsive thing to say, but it’s not something impossible. It’s something they could make happen, if she wanted it—and he thinks she does want it, because, in the next second, her lips collide with his, and it’s not soft and whispering but hard and yearning, like a wave crashing up on shore.

Once they break apart, once they breathe, she looks at him, and her eyes are bright.

“Do you mean that?” she says. He nods. Then. “How?”

So they talk—about foster care laws, about how many A.P. credits Sara has taken, about how much time she might need to earn her diploma, take the S.A.T.s, and convince her social worker that she is old enough to be legally emancipated from the system.

Both she and Grissom are scientists, which means both she and Grissom are realists. They know that getting her to school with him is not something they can accomplish right away, but maybe they can accomplish it by Winter Semester or Summer Term—that maybe a half a year or a year from now, they could go to school together again and preserve this small universe that they’ve made, that means everything to them.

The next step is research and then coming up with a kind of outline. They talk to their physics teacher and the guidance counselor, then to Sara’s social worker, and then finally to Betty.

Not everyone thinks their plan is a good one. Some of the adults they talk to point out that high school relationships don’t often last, and it’s risky for them to build their whole lives around something they may not want to maintain after a few months have passed.

Since Grissom and Sara are realists, they already know what possibilities exist in this scenario. But what they also know is that they are each other’s best friends, more than anything, and that their friendship won’t change, no matter what else does.

They say they want to go forward, and the adults fuss about it. But, ultimately, it’s hard for anyone to argue with their research—or with Sara’s 4.4 G.P.A. and the fact that she has amassed enough credits in enough school districts all over the state that she is technically already a junior, even though she’s only in the ninth grade.

When she scores in the 99.999th percentile on the S.A.T., that settles it: universities, including the one to which Grissom has already committed himself, want her, and as soon as she can finish up her high school coursework, they expect her to matriculate, never mind that she isn’t yet sixteen.

So that’s the plan: Grissom will graduate and head to the university come fall, and Sara will finish up high school as soon as she can, following quickly after. In the interim, her social worker will try to keep her placements with families who live in the district, and she’ll still go to see Betty and Hank as often as she likes.

It will only be a few months that she and Grissom are actually apart, they tell themselves.

They try to be pragmatic about it.

Still, the closer Grissom’s graduation draws, the more he dreads leaving Sara behind, even for a day—and especially because he sees her getting nervous, withdrawing to that faraway place again, almost seeming to shrink before his eyes. She smiles less, looks sadder more often, and clings to his hand like she can’t bear to let it go. Their impending separation is going to be hard on her, no matter how brief its duration.

Grissom doesn’t know what to do.

To make matters worse, it’s not just Sara who needs his attention.

Catherine and Eddie’s names are plastered all over the school on posters for the prom. Initially, they put on a good public front, strolling the school grounds with Eddie’s arm slung over Catherine’s shoulders. But soon Catherine isn’t just showing up to her tutoring sessions frustrated. She’s showing up to them in tears. She doesn’t talk about what’s going on, but Grissom can tell that it’s getting harder and harder for her to hold on until the end of the year and that her “bigger and better things” must seem impossibly far away.

Ten days before the prom, all the Catherine and Eddie posters come down from the walls in the school. Grissom doesn’t ask about it, but he gathers that, most likely, Catherine and Eddie won’t be attending the dance—or at least not together.

When Catherine comes to her tutoring session that day, her mascara is blotchy and her eyes look as sad as Sara’s did back at the start of the semester.

“We don’t have to go over Avogadro’s constant today,” Grissom offers, passing her a tissue.

She wipes her eyes. “No,” she says. “Please talk Avogadro’s constant to me. Let’s just do chemistry. Chemistry’s good.”

But Grissom doesn’t know if chemistry is good or if Catherine will be okay.

She’s not the only one in distress, either: Trouble seems to be gathering around Grissom’s whole team like storm clouds.

Warrick skipped another test, and Nick is straddling the line between a B+ and an A- in physics. He says his old man will be so disappointed in him if he doesn’t pick up the slack.

Greg has been trained on everything having to do with the biology and chemistry T.A.ships but still lags behind on the physics materials, and there are only a few weeks left in the school year for him to learn all of his responsibilities. The more stressed he gets, the more he goofs off. He’s taken to building a model skyscraper out of paperclips rather than practicing with the apparatus he’ll need to use to test Boyle’s Law during classroom demonstrations.

Even Hank seems nervous. When Grissom and Sara come home from school, he doesn’t try to make them play ball with him. He just sits at their feet and whines, like he knows a change is coming, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

Thinking about everywhere he needs to be and everything he needs to do causes Grissom to start getting migraines. He wants to spend all his free time with Sara, and his heart constricts in his chest whenever he thinks about how, soon, he won’t get to see her every day. But he also knows that other people need him, too, and that he’s not doing very well himself.

At night, he lies awake in bed, his skull throbbing. He considers everyone’s troubles as if they were math equations that only he could solve.

But that’s the funny thing.

Over this school year, he has somehow acquired a group of people for whom he feels immensely responsible. In spite of himself, he cares about them. They have become his friends—even talkative Greg.

Grissom never had friends until now, and maybe that’s why he somehow never realized that friendship is reciprocal—that if he cares about what happens to the people who comprise his private universe, they care about what happens to him in return, and if he tries to help them with what matters most to them, then they’ll try to help him with what matters most to him, just the same.

It starts when Greg comes to Grissom and says that he’s decided not to take the physics T.A.ship after all.

“I kind of want to have a social life,” Greg explains, “and T.A.ing for all three sciences would give me a lot to do. I’d have no free time, I’d never be able to get out, I’d just have to prep all day, every day—and that would totally suck. No offense.”

“Greg,” Grissom says, “it’s too late in the year for the teacher to find a replacement for you. There wouldn’t be time to train anyone else, and—”

Greg cuts Grissom off. “Ask Sara if she wants to do it,” he says, shrugging. “She’s spent so much time watching you do your T.A. thing that she already knows all this stuff anyway, and I could help her cover anything she’s missed. Plus, it would be fun. She and I could hang out—as friends! I’m not trying to steal your girlfriend. I’m just saying that next year, you’re not going to be here, so we could both use someone else to talk to.” He shrugs again, smiles, and adds another paperclip to his skyscraper. “What do you think?”

His idea isn’t actually a bad one, even if his pitch is a bit strange. When Grissom runs it by Sara, she laughs a little. “Sounds like he’s trying to look out for me for you,” she says. “That’s kind of weird—but also kind of sweet. He idolizes you, you know.”

She says she’ll take the T.A.ship, at least until she earns her diploma. Grissom warns her that Greg talks a lot, but she says she already knew about that, and she doesn’t mind so much.

Greg isn’t the only one who tries to help Grissom deal with being separated from her.

Warrick and Nick offer to look out for Sara in their own way, too.

“Griss,” Warrick says one day, while the three of them are studying for Warrick and Nick’s upcoming final exams, “we just wanted to let you know that next year, nobody’s gonna mess with your girl.”

“Mess with her?” Grissom repeats, quirking an eyebrow. He’s not exactly sure what Warrick means, but he doesn’t like the sound of it.

Nick chimes in. “Yeah. Like, nobody’s gonna give her a hard time about anything, or else the whole football team will get on them. We talked to the guys about it.”

“Oh?” Grissom says.

“Well, sometimes—,” Nick starts, but then he looks to Warrick for help.

“Sometimes,” Warrick says, “certain kids like to mess with the T.A.s. Especially the girl T.A.s. Like pull pranks on them and stuff. But nobody’s gonna do that with Sara. She’s cool now. We’ve got her.”

When Grissom tells Sara about this new development, she laughs even harder than she did about Greg. “They actually said that?” she asks him. “Wow. I had no idea.”

“Me, either,” says Grissom.

“No,” Sara says, “I mean, I—I had no idea that you had a fan club of football players.”

Grissom considers the notion. “Well,” he says, “I think that means that now you have a fan club of football players, too.”

And as bizarre as it may seem, knowing that she does have a fan club of football players and a fellow T.A. in Greg Sanders actually helps him feel a bit better about what might happen with her next year. Even when he’s not around, people are going to notice her. They have noticed her. He’s not leaving her alone with no one to talk to and nothing to do.

Still, even knowing that she’ll have friends in his absence doesn’t fix the fact that he’s going to miss her—that he’s already started to miss her preemptively, even though he’s not yet gone. Nowadays, when they lie on the couch, and he’s stroking her hair, he can’t stop himself from thinking about how he has to savor these moments because soon he will be someplace else, far away from her. Every word, every touch, every moment is precious and finite. He knows he’s going to be lonely without her. No one has ever understood him like she does. Ever since he’s known her, he hasn’t felt like a ghost anymore. He’s felt like a real person. He’s not ready to go back to whole days spent invisible and alone.

That’s what he’s thinking about when, during the last week of school, Sara walks him to the quad and parts from him with a kiss on his cheek, leaving him at the table where he is set to meet up with Catherine for one of their final tutoring sessions before the exam. He watches Sara go, retreating under the cloister and back inside the school. Brief partings like this one have always been part of their routine, but now they hurt him, like a wound deep in his side.

He doesn’t even notice it when Catherine comes up behind him.

“She’ll call you every day,” Catherine says as if in answer to a question, though Grissom hasn’t asked her anything. He looks up, confused, and finds that her expression is smug. “I’m serious,” she says. “I mean, I truly don’t get the whole ‘dating a freshman’ thing, but everyone can see that that girl is crazy about you, and she has been since Day One. I mean, Greg Sanders asked her to prom way in advance, the first week she moved in back in January, and she turned him down, point-blank, because she’d already met you.”

Grissom wants to ask Catherine where she learned all this information when he’s never heard any of it before, but instead what he says instead is, “Sara wants to go to prom with me?”

Catherine frowns at him. “Duh,” she says. Then, realizing the implications of his question. “You mean you haven’t asked her yet? Grissom, the dance is on Friday!” She stares at him, incredulous. Grissom can tell that she thinks this whole conversation is indicative of his incredibly myopic bullshit.

Now it’s Grissom’s turn to frown. “Why didn’t she tell me she wants to go?”

“No girl wants to have to ask her boyfriend to ask her to the prom,” Catherine says. “Trust me. That’s not romantic.” She sits down beside Grissom at the table. “You’ve got to pull your head up from your microscope sometimes.”

“So should I still ask her, or would it not be romantic now that you’ve told me I should do it?” Grissom says, seriously confused about all of the decorum and baffling, nonsensical social cues surrounding this particular teenage ritual.

Catherine sets her hand on his arm. “Don’t tell her I told you you should ask her,” she says. “But ask her. It’s probably too late now for her to find a dress at the store, but I still have my dresses from all the formals I went to junior year. She’s taller than I am, but I’m sure at least one of them could work. We can probably drum up a tux for you somewhere.” Now her expression looks nothing but kind. “At least one of us should get to enjoy senior prom. You should go and have a good time with your girlfriend.”

Grissom stares at her. “Even if I don’t know how to dance?”

“Grissom, if I have to teach you how to dance in-between now and Friday, I’ll do it. Just ask your girlfriend to prom and show her a good time. Please.”

Of course, if Sara really does want to go to prom, then Grissom wants to go with her. It’s just that he has never asked anyone to a dance before, and he’s not exactly sure how to go about it.

He is vaguely aware that other boys staged elaborate scenes when they extended invitations to their intended prom dates. Some bought flowers. Others decorated lockers. Even Eddie Jerkface brought Catherine chocolates in homeroom on the day he asked her if she would run for royalty with him.

Considering that prom is in three days, and he doesn’t have a tux, and Sara doesn’t have a dress, and he hasn’t bought them tickets yet, Grissom isn’t sure that he has enough time to plan any sort of extravagant gesture. Part of him thinks it doesn’t matter, but part of him worries that Sara might feel deprived if he doesn’t make any sort of effort. Since this prom will be the only one either of them ever attend, he feels some pressure to get things right.

He thinks about it all the way home from school, after he finishes tutoring Catherine and Sara comes to meet him again. He and Sara are in the living room, their homework spread out on the floor around them.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Sara says. Then. “You’ve been really quiet today.”

Grissom means to tell Sara that he’s sorry that he’s being quiet and that he just has a lot on his mind, with finals and tutoring and everything that’s happening. He wants to buy himself a least a little while longer to think up a proper prom proposal—maybe to ask Betty what she thinks he ought to do. But when he opens his mouth to respond to Sara’s statement, what comes out is, “Maybe we should go to prom together.”

Sara’s mouth falls open, and she gasps and then seems to stop breathing afterwards. Grissom knows she’s surprised, but he doesn’t know whether she’s pleasantly surprised or not. Only milliseconds have passed since he made his suggestion, but the longer Sara goes without answering him, the tighter his chest feels, and the more he thinks that if she says no, he might not actually survive. He doesn’t care about the prom itself, but he’s suddenly realized that he needs this: that he needs just one more perfect night with Sara before he has to leave her to go to college. He hangs on her silence, waiting, until he can’t abide it anymore.

“So, uh, what do you think? You know, uh—?”

“Yes,” Sara says so quickly that he couldn’t have finished his question even if he’d had the words. She smiles at him, her brightest smile—the one that make it seem like she doesn’t even know what sadness is anymore, like she’s never been anything but happy before in her life. “Let’s do this.” She laughs, maybe at the strangeness of the exchange, maybe at something else. The reality of what he’s asked her seems to sink in. “Since when do you care about prom?” she teases.

“Since I met you,” he says.

And it’s the truth.

Back in September, Grissom couldn’t have imagined any of this—not that he’d be going to prom with the girl he loves; not that when he told his mother about his plans, she’d dig his father’s old tuxedo out of the attic, and it would fit him perfectly; not that he’d be attending six hours of dancing boot camp under the tutelage of the school’s head cheerleader two days before the prom; certainly not that the girl he loves could look so beautiful in a borrowed dress, waiting for him on the front stoop of the house where she lives, her smile shy and no sadness in her eyes at all.

“Wow,” Grissom says, stopping with his hands jammed into his pockets, his heart in his throat. He finds himself returning Sara’s smile, feeling strangely shy himself even though he and Sara have known each other and been in love for almost five months now.

She notices his look. “What?” she says, still smiling, seated on the concrete stoop.

He offers her his hand to help her up. “It’s just,” he says, “you make me happy.”

Instead of using his hand to stand up with, Sara tugs him down beside her, so that they’re sitting hip-to-hip. She points up. “The light pollution isn’t so bad tonight,” she says. “Look at all the stars.”

She’s right: There are stars everywhere, like a bright blanket spread over the big bed of the sky. For a long time, Grissom remains silent, and so does she, and they stare heavenward, holding hands, sitting close together in the quiet and the dark.

Then, Sara says, “Gil? I don’t know how to dance.”

“What?” Grissom says.

Sara shrugs, awkward. “I, uh, don’t know how to dance. How much were the prom tickets?”

Grissom shrugs, awkward now, too. “Not much.”

Sara offers him another shy smile. “What if we didn’t go?”

Grissom probably shouldn’t smile back, but he does. “My mother would be angry,” he says. “Catherine would be angrier.”

“But what would you think?” Sara asks him. “Do you want to dance?”

Grissom considers for a moment. He shakes his head. “I just want to be with you. That’s why I wanted to go to prom—just so that we could have a night together. But we could do that anywhere.”

Sara smiles a different smile now, almost wicked. “I’ve got an idea, then.”

Sneaking back into Grissom’s house isn’t that difficult, given that Betty can’t hear it when the screen door opens and Hank remains amazingly composed even when he sees Grissom appear unexpectedly in the kitchen. Grissom’s up the stairs, to his bedroom, grabbing the telescope and some other provisions, and meeting Sara at the car again in fifteen minutes. They’re both still in their formalwear, him in his father’s tuxedo, her in Catherine’s dress. They should be having their photos taken in the overcrowded gymnasium at the high school right now, but instead they’re driving down Grissom’s street, and then they’re taking the main road out of town, following the highway until they’re all the way past the city lights, in the dark, low countryside.

It’s stupid and impulsive, going off by themselves, they know, but they also know that they’re only going to be teenagers once. Grissom wanted to have a perfect night, and this is it—this is them spreading out a blanket over the earth and lying down together, watching as the constellations rise higher and higher over the horizon, bright enough that they can see them well even without the telescope, bright enough that they can be sure they’ll always remember the sight even years from now, when they’re old.

A meteor streaks across the sky, and, even though they’re both scientists and realists, Grissom says to Sara, “Make a wish.”

He feels her smile against his neck. “Okay,” she says, though she doesn’t tell him what she wished for. After another minute, she draws a breath. “I’m going to call you every day, and if your mom ever goes to visit you, I’ll go with her, and we’ll bring Hank. I’ll probably write you letters, too. You’re going to get sick of me before I’m even there with you.”

“I think that’s scientifically impossible,” Grissom says, “—me getting sick of you. And, besides, you’re going to be with me really soon. You’re going to graduate and stick Greg with all the T.A. work, and then we’ll be able to see each other every day again.” He pulls her closer to him so he can kiss her on the mouth. Then. “Thank you for finding me.”

That’s the feeling Grissom keeps with him through the next few days: through taking his last tests, cleaning out his locker, returning his books, passing the keys to the teacher carrels off to Greg and Sara, donning his cap and gown, and standing before his graduating class, delivering his commencement speech as valedictorian.

“Since the time of Archimedes, human beings have attempted to derive a Theory of Everything—one cogent, all-encompassing framework to prove how every physical aspect of the universe interconnects. That’s our oldest human impulse: to want to know that we’re not alone and that our lives aren’t arbitrary.

Researchers from the University of Virginia have recently used magnetic resonance imaging to show that the human concept of the self includes the people that we’re closest to and that, consequently, we only come to know ourselves as we form bonds with others.

For as much as I’ve enjoyed my academic studies at this school, that’s the lesson that I’ll carry with me as I head out into the world: that the greatest learning is in how to relate to others and that we’re all just a little bit better at being ourselves when we allow others into our lives and when we form communities—or, in my case, a team.

Until this year, I wasn’t very social, and I’m still not the biggest party guy, as our salutatorian will attest—”

He nods to Catherine, seated on the stage behind him. She’s still giving him hell about skipping out on prom after she put so much work into teaching him to dance, but even she won’t deny that he’s not the same boy who started tutoring her back in December. She smirks at him and nods her head.

She’ll allow him to say what he’s going to say next.

“—but I have found my team, and I feel like I’ve learned more this year than I have in years past. Along with my esteemed classmates, I hope that as we disperse out into the world, whether it is to pursue more formal studies, take work, start families, or otherwise explore, we can each discover our own Theory of Everything: a way the world makes sense to us, and the people who make it so. Entropy may generally increase in the universe, but may we find the people who ground us and the bonds which make us truly feel human and alive.”

After the ceremony concludes, Grissom tells his mother and Sara that he has some business to finish up on campus and sends them home with the promise that he’ll follow along later, and then they can have cake and ice cream and play ball with Hank.

Once they leave him—with a flurry of kisses, both of them—he performs his errands.

He drops a letter in the tenth grade biology teacher’s mailbox, recommending that Warrick Brown pass the class and not be placed on academic probation. He knows that a passing grade won’t get Warrick out of trouble with his creditors or help pay for his grandmother’s house, but it’s the best way he can figure as to how to help Warrick with his secret, and he hopes that it’s enough to make a difference—to give Warrick a chance to do better next year, when it really counts.

Then, even though it’s not technically his duty anymore, he stops in with the tenth grade physics teacher and offers to help her enter grades. He only breathes a sigh of relief when he sees that Nick Stokes earned a 97.6% A in the class—the top mark.

Next, he tracks down Greg Sanders, who has the unenviable job of inventorying every microscope in the science department before the school closes down for the summer. Greg is, as expected, taking longer to finish the job than he should, putting the finishing touches on his paperclip skyscraper between every item logged and mechanism inspected. He has his headphones on, but his music is so loud that Grissom can hear it anyway.

Grissom taps him on the shoulder. “Hey, Sanders!” he says loudly.

Greg sits bolt upright, surprised that Grissom has managed to sneak up so close to him without his noticing. He pulls off his headphones, looking guilty about everything—the music, his slow progress on the inventory, the impressive height of the paperclip skyscraper; all of it.

“I, uh, only have fifty more to go,” he says quickly. “I’m almost done.”

But Grissom isn’t here to reprimand him.

Instead, Grissom asks, “Do you like dogs?” He doesn’t wait for Greg to answer before explaining, “Because I have a dog, and Sara is going to play fetch with him for me while I’m away at school. But my dog—well, he has a lot of energy. And it would probably be best if he had two people to play with him at a time. So I was thinking that if you liked dogs, maybe you could help give Sara a hand with him sometimes.”

Greg looks at Grissom like he’s just posed a trick question. “I-I’m not trying to steal your girlfriend,” he says nervously. “And even if I was, she wouldn’t—”

Grissom nods. “I know, Greg.”

Greg considers Grissom a moment longer, staring at him as if they were just meeting for the first time. “Dogs are pretty cool,” he says slowly. “I could maybe help Sara sometimes. If she wants.”

“Good,” Grissom says. He starts to walk away, then stops. “If you wanted, you could also maybe come over to my house later today and meet my dog—after you finished up here with the microscopes. My mom’s, uh, made some cake—you know, for graduation.”

Greg absolutely beams at him. “Sure,” he says. “I could probably make it. I mean, just as soon as I finish up here.”

Grissom smiles back at him. “Of course.”

Of all Grissom’s errands, there’s one he’s saved for last.

He tracks down Catherine Flynn, turning in her cheerleading uniform at the athletic director’s office. He feels nervous, almost in the same way that he did when he asked Sara to prom. His heartbeat flutters in his throat.

Catherine looks up at him when he approaches.

“I’m, uh, not very good at goodbyes,” he says—which is not the statement he wanted to lead with.

“Goodbye?” Catherine repeats. “Grissom—”

He shrugs. “Well, I mean, I know there’s still the summer, but I figured—”

“What?” Catherine says. “That you could get rid of me that easily? Nuh-uh. We’re going to see each other this summer. I’m going to be lifeguarding at the pool, and you and Sara are going to come swimming. I’ll get you a discount.”

“Oh,” Grissom says. “Well, thank you, Catherine, but what I meant was that, after this summer—”

She cuts him off again. “Listen, Grissom, you’re going to State, I’m going to the U. It’s only an hour’s drive between them. We’re going to meet up once a month and study together for our science classes. You edged me out by .01% of a grade point to get valedictorian, and, this time, I’m gonna win, and I want you to know about it when it happens.”

Grissom did not all expect the conversation to go this way, but he’s glad it is. He processes what Catherine’s told him. “Okay, then,” he says. “I guess I’ll see you later.”

“You will,” Catherine tells him, confident as usual, and he realizes that now he’s part of her strategy—and, inexplicably, her bigger and better things.

So Grissom has a graduation party. So he spends the summer with Sara—but also with his whole team, at the pool, in the park, and even in the countryside, showing off his telescope under blankets of stars. His mother and Sara help him move into his dorm during the last week of August. He doesn’t even make it a week at school before Catherine shows up on his doorstep at 2:30 am, ranting to him about how the T.A. for her chemistry lab doesn’t know jack about reactivity.

Surprisingly, Grissom doesn’t feel like a ghost. His roommate, Conrad Ecklie, is a different brand but the same vintage kind of jerk as Eddie Willows, but there are people he gets along with on campus—a club for C.O.D.A. kids which he occasionally attends, other students who love science and spend their free time devising experiments, even when they’re not in class, an entomology professor who keeps open office hours and always welcomes him for a chat. Grissom takes note of many interesting activities going on around campus and makes sure to remember them for when he has his nightly phone calls with Sara, who always asks for a report on his day before telling him about all the latest goings-on at Clark Senior Intermountain High School.

Of course, even with the phone calls, Grissom still misses her. He finds himself thinking about her all the time, wanting to reach over and take her hand, as if she were still beside him. In late September, she ends up switching placements, and her new foster parents limit her phone time, severely cutting down on how much she and Grissom can talk. That’s when they start writing letters, and, as sentimental as it sounds, Grissom probably reads each one that she sends to him no fewer than a hundred times, because some part of him aches and aches, wanting to be close to her but not knowing any real recourse.

He counts down the days until Family Weekend at the beginning of October because he knows that Betty’s coming and planning to bring Sara along with her.

When his countdown finally reaches zero, and he waits perched at his dorm room window until he sees his mother’s car in the parking lot. A sun glare prevents him from looking through the windshield into the car, but he knows who’s inside and thrills at the thought. He barrels down the stairs as quickly as he can, but in the instant when he sees Sara, standing outside the car, waiting for him on the sidewalk, he stops in his tracks, temporarily stunned.

She’s just how he remembered her, with brown eyes that put his heart into the stratosphere, a pretty rose petal mouth that he can’t wait to kiss, and one of his old jackets that she must’ve stolen from his closet.

She has a ponytail, and she’s beautiful.

She smiles at him. “Aren’t you going to say something?” she asks, suddenly shy in the way she sometimes is under his attention.

“Sorry,” Grissom tells her. “Seeing you again left me a little speechless.”

But among the many things that Grissom has learned since falling in love with Sara, it’s that words aren’t always the most important thing. So in the next second, he’s going to her, and then he’s holding her, hoisting her up in his arms off the concrete. They’re kissing, and Sara’s mouth tells a thousand happy secrets against his. He’s vaguely aware that his mother is taking pictures, and Hank is barking like an idiot, but mostly what he knows is this:

He’s never felt so alive.


End file.
